Wednesday, March 08, 2017

North & South

Photos from the ends of the path. Oh blimey, doesn't half show up the weeds at the N boundary, eh? Need to get the hoe busy in the next week, no later.

Looking North 5th March 2017

Looking North: Here, to the right, is No.5 bed. You can see it wants a lot of work to get it clean, which is in hand. To the left is No.1 bed. Just out of sight is a heap of 2 tons approx of oomska, (you can just see it covered with a salmon colored plastic sheet in the top right hand of the other photo.) There's also the edge of the heap of riddled earth; it's almost as big as the oomska heap, so 2 tons or so of that.

To the right of the upended wheelbarrow, that's my temporary tool store, designed to keep things out of the rain until the shed gets built. But here's what I've learned: storing tools horizontally is just plain daft - one needs to crouch down to get at them, and as they're all lying on top of one another, difficult to extract. Also, I need to be working in that area. So I'm going to chop up and move the woodpile which is currently at the SE corner, build some kind of structure there to stand the tools in and to give me somewhere to stand out of the rain.

Looking South 5th March 2017

Looking South: Apart from the weeds, you can see the garlic growing nicely to the right. Opposite them is the pond, at its usual half full. The headline from the pond this week, one of the three typha latifolia is greening up at the base. It's their 2nd year, and should flower, and produce more reproductive rhizomes. It's invasive, which is cool because it will displace the docks and grass growing around the pond fringe now, but cannot spread beyond the pond. 6ft architectural plants, a dozen or more, will transform that part of the plot

South of the pond, the left middle ground of the photo, the winter field beans in No.4 bed. I'm minded to let them crop, rather than chop them down now, which is what one's supposed to do because they use up the nitrogen they've stored if left. But if I let them crop, that's an awful lot of beans to plant in the autumn of this year.

The methodology for this batch was to broadcast them on the bed, and then spread over a couple of inches of oomska. The problem with this plan is that there are already signs of them having chocolate spot, which leads to "significant yield loss". But just 5 beans per plant, (ha ha, Jack and the Beanstalk), would yield enough to fill 4 beds next winter, (that is, all of the plot apart from No.4 bed, which will have mustard over winter, peas & beans in 2018).

Opposite the beans, blue tarpaulin. I know, I know, I don't approve, but this year I need all the bloomin' help I can get.